[nabs-l] academic library access

[Vejas Vasiliauskas]

Hi,
If you have a Bookshare account, you could try looking for the 
book there.  If you're working on a research paper of some kind, 
Bookshare usually has some good books on the topic you're 
researching.
I never used the databases in high school; do you find using them 
helpful?
Vejas


----- Original Message -----
From: Ashley Bramlett via nabs-l <nabs-l at nfbnet.org
To: "National Association of Blind Students mailing list" 
<nabs-l at nfbnet.org
Date sent: Sat, 9 Jan 2016 16:22:05 -0500
Subject: [nabs-l] academic library access

Hi all,

I’d like to hear about the level of support and accessibility 
of your library and the resources it has.
I’ve written about my struggles before.  The gist is that many 
library databases have access issues.  The ebsco ones are the 
worst.  Its hard to open the pull down list of options, but I 
think I finally did open them with spacebar.  I find that 
databases run through Oxford and proquest are generally user 
friendly and accessible.  Jstor is fairly decent, but seems like 
most articles are image pdfs or display on the screen as images.  
I kept wondering why jaws was saying graphic and the next line 
said page 1 of 5 or however many pages it was; then it occurred 
to me that the text must be an image; so I found the pdf link to 
download it.
The pdf was an image too, so I had to convert it.

Generally, when I was in the university setting, I got support 
from the reference desk.  They retrieved books for me and other 
students had to find them by call number.  I got pretty much the 
same support as other students.  I was on my own with access 
barriers.  Sometimes, I was able to get a library assistant to 
sit down with me and look at the database and then email me 
relevant articles.  This worked much faster than jaws.

Now, to learn more, I’m taking classes at Northern virginia 
community college, nova, while looking for work.

Many Nova reference staff are great and in fact go the extra 
mile.  They explain well how to search databases.  Others seem to 
struggle how to verbalize things.  Normally, they demo the task 
and have the information seeker watch what they are doing